A funny thing happened when I got my Aikido first degree black belt. I was living at my dojo at the time, training 12 times a week and had spent seven months training for my test. The actual test passed in a sort of focused haze, but I am told I did very well. The funny thing though was the next weekend.
At my dojo, Kato Sensei, our teacher from Japan and our connection to Hombu Dojo (the world headquarters for Aikido, in Tokyo) comes by once, or twice, a year to give a training intensive and run the black belt rank tests. The pattern of these visits is generally: Kato sensei flies on on a Wednesday. He then teaches Thursday and Friday night. Saturday and Sunday are the core of the intensive, with two 90 minutes class each day. Monday night is tests and pot luck party.
On the occasion of my first degree black belt test, Kato Sensei was staying for an extra weekend to hold classes at another local dojo (that meant he taught almost every night at our dojo during the week, which was friggin’ awesome!!) For Kato Sensei’s visits, members of a number of other dojos in the area come to attend the weekend intensives. When we went up to the second weekend intensive on this visit, I was still tripping over my new Hakama (the traditional pantaloons that Aikido black belts wear.) Kato Sensei can be hard to follow some times due to his not speaking English, mumbling, inexperience in teaching (at the time he had only had his dojo for a handful of years), and his nearly inhuman amount of skill and talent. I have noticed that when he teaches people seem to gain a level of confidence in what they can do in Aikido which is paradoxically due to the fact (in part) that they are so bloody confused that they just go for it.
So there I was, training with a bunch of members of other dojos whom I had been seminar training with for four years. Kato Sensei ran a fun, intense class, and during one of the techniques he showed a variation that most of us had not seen and which was pretty advanced in its application. Right after the session ended four of the guys from other dojos I had trained with for years, who were all white belts just like I was the week before, and who had trained with me hard and with enthusiasm but whom had never asked me a single thing about my opinion about what Kato has shown rushed up to me while I was fumbling with getting my Hakama off to ask me, “What was he doing in when he…?” They asked a couple of questions as if I had any idea about what Kato had done. I gave my thoughts, but was incredibly cognizant that the only thing that had changed was the color of my belt and wearing the floppy Hakama which had tripped me three times during the class.
Since then I have noted a weird (to experience) dichotomy that occurs with getting a black belt in Aikido. Aikido is a bit unique amongst modern martial arts in that the traditional form of staying a white belt (of various ranks) until you become a black belt (of various ranks) with no visual cues being available to perceive the subdivisions of the two main ranks has been preserved. Some schools of Aikido have taken to using colored belts for their pre-black belt ranks, but they are not the norm.
So, the trading of the white belt for the black is a stark visual contrast. This marker makes people treat you in new ways that can be quite startling for the newly minted black belt. The white belts suddenly become much more comfortable with asking you for advice, and the black belts now become more openly demanding that you advance. The expectation is that you now have a clue about what you are doing, and from different sides they expect you to live up to that. The white belts hope that you will be able to answer their questions with some expertise, and your fellow black belts hope that you will prove that you are capable of the same.
This puts you into the interesting position of being half-student, half-teacher. Of course you are always a student because Aikido is (like any martial art) so subtle and broad that no one will ever get to the “end” of it, but now you are part of the process that hands the art along to the generations of practitioners to come. In an odd way the process of advancing rank is one were you earn the privilege to test, and then after the test you must earn the rank awarded.
I don’t know if it is possible to really appreciate the feeling of being in that position until it happens, but I surely wish someone would have clued me in beforehand.
So there. 
Please let me know what you think in the comments.
Cheers!
Tags: Aikido
